From about 450 to 470 AD an amazing individual ruled in the Roman island of Britain. This isolated chronological fact is the historical acorn out of which would grow the vast oak tree of literature we know as the Matter of Britain. But because this particular man had his floruit during the most obscure part of British history (namely the century which includes the withdrawal of the Roman legions and the first ingress of the Saxons) little can be said about him with any degree of certainty. What would survive was his name. His name was Arthur.

In spite of his near anonymity, Arthur was one of those who eternally fascinate the generations. In early times monks grubbed about in their coffers of parchments for records of him, while in later ages famous men of literature like Chretien de Troyes, Malory, Spenser, Swinburne, Tennyson, and Mark Twain expanded the corpus. In the understanding of the public, Arthur became a Carolingian figure of authority sitting in stately detachment while feasting and assigning adventures to his retainers -- all of them knights and all of them fully medievalized.

But it was his death which caught the imagination of each age, for in that ending was vaguely felt to reside the enigma of every man : a record of worldly achievement alternating with a conclusion in ignominy and the unraveling of political and social structures, where fellowship sits down to dine with parricide, and there is no solution. It is the terminal question which is pivotal. The Matter of Britain says of life that at its best it becomes a quest, rarely successful, always ambiguous, and in its ending indistinct.

So pregnant with innuendos was the tale of Arthur that it has reached out and attached to itself that most poignant of myths, the myth of the return. With Arthur not dead but only asleep in a hill awaiting the call to arise and reintroduce the at-last-perfect reign, the Matter of Britain became an imperishable part of world literature and indeed of world mythology. The story of Arthur can be thought of as a secular counterpart of the great Christian myth, not consciously contrived to be such but crafted randomly over many centuries. As Christ was heralded by a star, so was our young Arthur marked by a sign of wonder, the sword out of a stone. As was John the Baptist to Christ, so was Merlin to Arthur, his mentor and authenticator.

And who else are the knights of the Round Table but the Disciples -- the elect. Christ's mission of salvation could well be a template for the recurrent quest: for the Holy Grail. And as for Judas and Mordred, they are forms of each other, the betrayers. Both Biblical and medieval story stress the meaningfulness of the two tragic endings, however different they may be in all other respects. A creative ambiguity belongs to both: the certainty that there had been a perceived failure and a going away in death, but the concomitant insistence that it was a state of transposition only and still awaited the crown of a second coming. Arthur would come again.

The Matter of Britain has always had something for everybody; it is an almost infinite roster of unreal and vivid worlds, from the French courts of love, to the crash of shields and the knightly automatism of Malory, through the neo-Platonic Arthur of Spenser (who was resurrected to support the Tudors) down to the satin charms of Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite heroes, and to the Camelot of Sir Boss. T.H. White and many other moderns have done curious and interesting things with the Matter of Britain. We cannot mention all of them. It does not demean any of the Arthuts here mentioned to state that they are all dream figures -so indeed is the Arthur of the present poem.

It is the work of the post-World War II archaeologists and the remarkable researches and writings of men like Ashe, Adcock, Morris, and others that underprop the history in this slender volume. Beyond this scholarly emphasis it has been my desire -- a rather Quixotic one I will admit -- to pay a poetic tribute to a real man Arthur, and to make his needs as a human being, his failure and his death, ours. Certainly it is an acceptable adventure to rescue Arthur from the confines of the Round Table, where he sits so distantly and so splendidly, while still telling again the age-old and memorable story.

Burr C. Brundage     May l, 1986

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